Fudged New World Atlas

Fudged new world atlas as Journalists across the UK received glossy press packs for the launch of a new Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. It included a press release declaring: “For the first time, the new edition … has had to erase 15 per cent of Greenland's once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the UK and Ireland ‘green’ and ice-free. This is concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever”.

Now glaciologists have been crying foul, saying that the 15 per cent figure is wildly inaccurate, reports New Scientist who contacted the Times Atlas team last week to find out where they had obtained the number, they cited the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, but were unable to be more precise. Ted Scambos the NSIDC's expert on Greenland ice, says neither he nor his colleagues were consulted in person. “Graduate students would not have made a mistake like this”, he told New Scientist. “If what The Times has said were true, something like a metre of sea level rise would have occurred in the past decade.” That is nowhere near what measurements show. “Currently, Greenland is losing mass at about a rate of 150 billion tonnes per year, or about one-third of a millimetre of sea level rise per year”, says Scambos. That means in the 12-year period from 1999 to 2011 that the Times Atlas analysed, meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet has contributed roughly 3 mm to global sea level rise – not 1 metre. In total, the Greenland ice sheet holds enough ice to raise global sea level by about 7 metres so the loss since 1999 has been less than 0.05 per cent.